5 October 2005

The main reason I stuck to Safari was the ability to create a bookmarks folder that automatically opens into tabs (“auto-click”). Yippee, Camino now does it, too (“Tab group”, hidden in the bookmark folders’ “Get Info” panes), and unlike Safari it also works for the Bookmarks menu’s folders. Which is good, considering Camino’s bookmarks bar is very poorly integrated, visually, so I’d rather hide it.

Two problems remaining: the lack of a sidebar (I can certainly live without it) and the fact that Camino seems to get mixed up when there are several login/password pairs associated to the same page (in my case, a page requesting a login, itself hidden behind a .htaccess requesting another). It’s annoying, but the case probably doesn’t arise too often.

P.S. Ah, it’s bug 187720. You suddenly feel less lonely when you get a number. A two-year-old number.

P.S. Damn, it also mixes my Gayattitude administration password and my personal login. Forget it. Such a pity to get stuck by such a dumb bug. I’ll have to keep an eye on Bugzilla now.

6 October

I was dead sure my library was going to near 50GB when I got back from holiday, what with all I’ve carried back in my luggage, and now it’s only a tiny bit over 30. Does iTunes delete tracks to make some room when you add too many at once? Or was I only under 20, not 40 as I thought? I did think it was odd I’d be that close to capacity of an hypothetical 60GB iPod.

The only thing to be remembered from this “One More Thing” is the (not particularly pretty) remote that sticks to the iMac’s side with magnets. That, and… uh, no, nothing else.

I hope at least Front Row will be a free download. Farewell, CenterStage. (Don’t bother checking the last link: I tried it, and it’s just unusable for now.)

P.S. The Apple Store offers the remote separately and mentions Front Row without including in the package listing, so you can assume the program will be available for everyone (contrary to what most tech blogs have starting assuming). I wonder if Front Row is easily usable with a (Bluetooth, obviously) mouse. And also if the magnets are inside the remote or the new iMac, and hence whether the remote sticks to the older iMacs as well. (By the way, isn’t the hard drive right there in the case?)

P.S. Their ad is so funny:

Oh yeah: with Front Row, you can watch, full-screen on your brand new 20-inch iMac, the latest Lost or Desperate Housewives episode (before anyone else, if I understood correctly), for two dollars… in 320x240 pixels. So, for the whole season, you spend more than for a DVD set, in a format that’s pretty much unwatchable on anything bigger than an iPod — it was already a bit lame to only offer 128kbps for music, but now it’s downright ridiculous.

P.S. The remote seems to use infrared, so it might not actually be usable with older iMacs, and Front Row may not be available either. Which would be a bit silly.

P.S. Watched the video keynote (which crashed the router / the connection / all of Wanadoo in Smallville), and Front Row does look cute. If it were usable on any Mac (such as, say, a mini plugged to a TV set — which has to be possible soon, at least with the next Mac mini revision) and accepted plugins (so that video capture / TV tuner box makers could add their functions to the interface — and I’ve got little hope on that front) it’d really be interesting. Otherwise, it’s a pity that CenterStage development is in such poor shape.

13 October

When podcasts arrived on the iTMS, I subscribed to a couple that published songs as is, without speech or anything. With iTunes 4.9, I only had to “Convert to MP3” in order to get the songs into the regular library. Since iTunes 5 (I suppose — maybe 6) it’s not working anymore: whatever you do, it remembers it was a podcast, and only displays it in the library’s “Podcasts” category — and in none of my automatic playlists.

Here’s the solution found on macosxhints: load fixid3tag.c, launch Terminal, type gcc fixid3tag.c -o fixid3tag, then for each mp3 (which you can get by drag-and-dropping from iTunes to the Finder) ./fixid3tag chemin/fichier.mp3 and, voilà, regular mp3s to be added back to the library.

You’re free to contribute a way to get fixid3tag to accept drag-and-drops, or an AppleScript wrapper to do the same.

P.S. Oh, wait, it’s pretty simple, so I can do it myself. Open Script Editor, type:

on open target files
repeat with onefile in target files
do shell script “/chemin complet/fixid3tag ” & quoted form of POSIX path of onefile
end repeat
end open

Save as an “Application bundle” (don’t know what it means exactly, but that’s what I read) and you get an application that’ll accept dropped MP3 files.

Macworld[via]: “ Front Row will only be available as part of the iMac, Apple says. The company has no plans to make it available in other Macs or as a standalone application.” Dumbasses. Well, they’re bound to change their mind soon enough, but it’s still dumb on so many levels.

14 October

Why don’t I see anyone complaining that, since iTunes 5 came out, Clutter started playing albums from the middle?

P.S. It must be trivial to fix, but I can’t get the source from CVS — no idea if the problem lies with me or SourceForge, I never used CVS beforethe server has trouble handling load. Couldn’t they just offer a simple source code zip?

As I said, since I upgraded to iTunes 5 (or 6, or maybe earlier for other users), when I double-click a Clutter album record, iTunes starts reading it from the middle.

Turns out there was no need to load the source code (though I finally managed to), as the AppleScript files are directly accessible from within the application.

So, if you like Clutter (and there’s no way you shouldn’t if you’re using iTunes on OS X) but find it unusable because of this bug, here’s a fix: ctrl-click (or right-click) Clutter.app, choose “Show Package Contents”, open “Contents”, then “Resources”, make a backup copy of the PlayArtistAlbum.scpt file and replace it with this one (this is a zip file — you’ve got to double-click it first to uncompress it). Relaunch Clutter.

Warning: I fixed it so it worked on my machine, but can’t make any guarantees as to whether it’ll work for anyone else. Which is why you should have made a backup copy first.

19 October

21 October

Received the invitation to test the Flock Developer Preview. Cute, but based on Firefox and XUL (hence heavier, clunkier and less polished than a native application on OS X, or any OS actually) and… without much of a point. It’s supposed to be a “social browser”, but all it does is display Flickr photos in a bar (but only one user’s photos) or managing bookmarks on del.icio.us (but, there again, without any consideration for the community aspect of it — it’s only saving and reading your bookmarks on a remote server, is all). Ah, and a blog editor, but I have no use for that since my blog isn’t compatible with standard APIs.

Considering the beta’s maturity, I doubt it’s going to get much more useful by the time it’s publicly released. There are much more interesting and much more social Firefox extensions already.

23 October

Remember when I explained that any self-respecting (or at least Garoo-respected) webmaster must keep a copy of his sites on his hard disk and edit his files there (and test them locally, if possible) before sending them onto the production server?

The problem is, you end up maintaining two mirrors of the same sites, and every time you want to change a file you have to open the FTP client, find the local copy, find the remote copy, and switch from text editor to FTP with every change in order to upload the file again. So annoying I eventually programmed my own program to automatically upload files to the right place on the server just by pressing a shortcut key in the text editor.

I knew I’d necessarily have to find an OS X equivalent if I wanted to ever work on the Mac (well, that and a Wacom tablet that’s not coming… ah, and being able to share my PC’s WWW directory without it being accessible to everyone without a password — turns out you have to define a password for your guest user: net user guest password after you have enabled the guest account) but I wasn’t in quite a hurry to look for a solution, being too afraid not to find it.

Turns out it’s not only possible, it’s actually quite simple: you only have to install Transmit, configure all your sites as favorites (paying attention to set the correct local and remote paths so Transmit can accurately determine where files are supposed to go), check the “DockSend” checkbox for each site, and… you’re done. Drag and drop files onto the Transmit icon, they’re uploaded to where they belong.

Now you’ll want to get TextWrangler to send its files to Transmit — drag-and-drop is fine for occasional use but quickly becomes a nuisance. Open your Library : Application Support : TextWrangler : Scripts folder, create a Upload Using Transmit.scpt file with this:

set fileName to “”
tell application “TextWrangler”
save document 1 of window 1
set fileName to (file of document 1 of window 1)
end tell
tell application “Transmit”
open fileName
end tell
tell application “System Events”
set this app to some item of (get processes whose name = “Transmit”)
set visible of this app to false
end tell

Explaining it all makes for a pretty long (and boring) post, but it’s so much simpler than learning C# and coding my own program. It works with only a few lines of scripting, and I can now manage my websites without having to move over to the PC’s keyboard. And you have no idea how much that changes everything.

28 October

DoubleCommand is finally available for Tiger. The “Disable Caps lock” option is obosolete for 10.4, but “PC style home and end keys” and “swap numpad-. with numpad-shift-.” are lifesavers (the former reinstates the numpad period, replaced with a comma on French keyboards — I had no idea it was available by pressing Shift).